Andy Stumpf and Joe Rogan examine FieldCraft Survival’s Mike Glover and Black Rifle Coffee’s Evan Hafer, both facing alleged social media suppression—Glover for survival content, Hafer post-military service—highlighting potential election-period censorship. Stumpf contrasts veterans’ silenced voices with their combat-proven discipline, while Rogan ties resilience to high-intensity training like Tabata and kettlebells, essential for jiu-jitsu. They critique reckless gun use (e.g., firing through car windows) and dismiss tactical fashion trends, favoring functional skills over aesthetics. Stumpf’s post-military reinvention—from CrossFit to podcasting—challenges the "broken toys" veteran stereotype, arguing war builds adaptability if veterans actively redefine their purpose beyond service. [Automatically generated summary]
Yeah, so he owns FieldCraft survival, which I would describe as preparedness, not to be confused with preppers, which I don't think has to be a pejorative term.
I think, you know, if you ever pay attention to that and that Project Veritas stuff where they've done undercover camera work with people that work on social media and they talk openly.
There's a Project Veritas has quite a few of these undercover expose interviews where they'll have like a reporter who is pretending they're on a date with a guy and then the guy will explain like what they do in terms of how they shadow ban people, how they keep people's pages from showing up and how they keep their engagement low.
So it is a thing.
Whether it's a thing on Facebook or Instagram or Twitter, which one does it the most and how they do it, I don't know.
But it is a thing.
And they do it with primarily with conservative pages.
They do it.
They do it if they think that I think they probably ramp it up around the time where elections come around because they want to make sure that, you know, these people don't have as much in like if you think about engagement, if you have a page and your page is a, let's say it's a pro-Hillary Clinton page and Hillary Clinton has run for president and you engage with a lot of people and your page gets a lot of traction.
If they can slow down your page traction, slow down the amount of engagement that you have, they can slow down the amount of people who might be influenced to vote for Hillary Clinton.
And say if you have a half a million followers or something significant like that, that could play out in whatever voting area you're in by 100 votes, 1,000 votes?
Evan Hafer, Black Rifle Coffee, Green Beret first.
So they went the Army path and they both went and contracted for what I'll call some alphabet soup organizations.
Millions of dollars put into their training.
Multiple deployments around combat theaters around the world and even to theaters before combat is there to whether you know prep the battle space or train a partner force doing their FID to foreign internal defense.
But then they get on social media and people want to not allow them to speak about the things that maybe they have learned and experienced during that time period.
I also feel like I am making up for a little bit of lost time because I was so focused on my old job for a very long period of time to the exclusion of everything else.
And a lot of things suffered.
And it's taken me a long time to come back around and realize, I forget who had said it, but it was, we were sitting down having a conversation.
They basically said, hey, here's the bottom line.
The job suffers last, always.
You'll sacrifice personal relationships.
You'll sacrifice marriages and loved ones.
You'll miss birthdays.
You'll miss holidays because the job suffers last.
And when you're living that life, you don't realize it.
In my 20s and early 30s, it was just completely front sight focused.
And then now looking back, you miss out on some stuff for sure.
And there's some consequences that you're going to have to make amends for.
I think that's something that a lot of people find if they're obsessed with whatever their career is, whether they're a pro athlete or whether you're a Navy SEAL or I mean, I would imagine anybody that works in business at a very high level, you make sacrifices that if you have a family and you're working 16 hours a day as a CEO of a company, what kind of family do you really have?
But it's basically about this billionaire family and they're all dysfunctional and it doesn't sound good on paper, but in real life, it's fucking awesome.
It's like one of the best written, best acted shows I think I've ever seen.
But like the life that these people live, it's like some, it's like a Rupert Murdoch type character who runs this gigantic media conglomerate.
If you're that kind of a person, your life is that.
That's your life.
There's no other way to do that job.
And I think that's probably in your old line of work, very similar.
And for anybody that wants to excel, if you want to be a high performer at any very difficult job, very competitive job, if you're going to really be at your best, you're going to give up a lot of stuff.
Yeah, I think the mistake is not realizing that you're missing out on it, which is the lie that I told myself, I think, looking back in my 20s and 30s.
Oh, my kids are young.
It's going to be fine.
Like, I have to go on this deployment.
Like, you know, complete focus in that direction.
And yeah.
I think if you're going to be a high performer, like you said, there is probably a lot of sacrifice.
I wonder, though, if those people, the Robert Murdoch, do they, on their deathbed, are they happy?
I mean, are they looking back with regret and wishing they had spent more time with their family?
Well, certainly when it comes to competitive endeavors, they don't want to.
Like, I was watching this documentary on, there's a great documentary on Marvin Hagler, Sugar A. It's called The Kings.
I think it's called The Kings.
It's Showtime.
It's on Marvin Hagler, Sugar Aid Leonard, and Tommy Hearns.
And it's all about when they were all battling against each other when it was, you know, a really golden era for both the wealthy weight and the middleweight divisions.
Yeah, that's it is the Kings.
Great.
I can't recommend it enough.
When I was a kid, I was just a gigantic Marvin Hagler fan.
I love Duran.
I love Sugar Aid Leonard and Tommy Hearns too.
But Hagler, when I was a kid, was the man because he was from Massachusetts, as I was.
And I would remember reading about what he would do.
And he would go into complete isolation.
Obviously, this is pre-cell phone days, but he wouldn't see his children at all during training camp.
He wouldn't see his wife.
He wouldn't see anything.
No idea what was going on.
So he would miss birthdays.
He'd miss some of his children's births.
He wouldn't be there for when his kids were born.
He just was focused completely on being the champ.
And he goes down in history as one of the greatest of all time because of that.
But it's like, is that what you want?
You know, do you want, if you want to be Marvin Hagler, you want to be that guy who was just, when you would see guys, when they'd step into that ring and they would look across the street, look across the ring at pure determination, pure will, pure discipline, and championship discipline.
I mean, the standards and the tolerances, they're tight.
And people will get benched sometimes and given time to work on whatever it is they need to work on.
And from my understanding, the modern day teams are doing a much better job of integrating the overall family unit, which I actually think will make the guys even more lethal.
If you know your family's taken care of, if your family is healthy, if you have a good communication dynamic and things are well when you go overseas, it lets you put even more mental horsepower into what's going on over there.
But the initial pipeline is a very, it's very physical.
You know, people say, you know, the physical part is 10% and the mental aspect is 90%.
And you can put whatever ratio you want to it.
It's challenging for both.
But the first thing the program does is it grinds people into dust.
That's what it's designed to do physically.
And that will expose a lot of mental weaknesses.
And all I can really say is that the big end of the siphon is very full.
The bottom end, the smaller end of the siphon, is still spitting out the exact same number of people.
So I think it's working.
I would say there's not a, I don't think there's a lack of qualified people.
My concern would be, and this is not based on anything that I have necessarily seen, but just kind of watching the world, that I think people may be perhaps pursuing that type of occupation for very different, perhaps more self-serving reasons now.
So in the history of the SEAL teams, there has never been a skydive into a fucking Dregger dive.
There are so many things.
So what they're wearing in front of that, that's a Larfive Dragger.
That's a rebreather.
The green bottle underneath is pure oxygen.
Inside of the black, like little clamshell thing is a container that has either probably softened lime or sodazorb, and it scrubs the carbon dioxide out of your breathing system so that the black cable going around their neck, or not cable, hose.
It's an inhalation and an exhalation hose.
So you purge all of the carbon dioxide out of your system and you're breathing pure O2.
Yeah, I mean, if you want to compete, like amateur fighters, you think about how many guys are fighting amateur and they're out there getting kicked and punched and strangled and they're not getting a goddamn penny.
And I think that everybody should go through that phase in their life where you see where you want to go and you're getting just your dick stomped into the dirt and you're not being rewarded for it in any way and you have to struggle and fight and just grind your way to that end state.
Yeah, I'm a firm believer that those uncomfortable experiences of failure are, they are so critical to your development as a human being and not just your development in whatever the endeavor of choice is, but your development as a human being.
That if you don't have those, the people that seek too much comfort, if you don't have those rough experiences, you don't develop properly.
Those people who seek too much comfort, they don't develop right.
They're like a salamander that never becomes its mature form.
There's something missing.
The uncomfortable experience of failing or of being smushed, of being overwhelmed by the competition, like being completely inadequate, completely unprepared, completely insufficient to get the job done.
Like that's important to know because otherwise you go through this life with like, how many guys out there who have never had any physical altercation with people have this completely distorted perception of what they're capable of doing.
You know, to go back to, again, my old job, people will equate or they talk about mental toughness with it a lot.
And everybody has some degree of mental toughness, right?
Like you're born with some, but I'm a firm believer that it can actually be taught as well.
And we've talked about this offline.
I think we were at the Deseret talking about the theory of keeping your world small, right?
Little small chunks and stuff like that.
The way you set your goals drastically will impact, I think, the statistical odds of success, but also seeking difficult things and finding failure.
Resilience, the only way you're going to build resilience is if you push up against things that are hard.
You know, the definition of resilience is an object being pushed from its normal state and returning to that state.
I think the goal should be return to that state plus 0.01%.
But if you always avoid those things, how are you ever going to expect to be capable of handling the challenges of life?
And I think that's where the mental toughness aspect of not the SEAL community, but I would say the military to a degree, but specifically because I can speak to the special operations world, the pipelines, they're just wrought with failure.
I mean, the curriculum is designed to find your weakest point and then exploit it and get in there with a rake and just fucking dig around in your head.
And it's failure after failure after failure after failure.
Not catastrophic, but small failure, small punishment.
And there are people who see that as a roadblock and they quit.
And there are people who see that as a motivation and they move forward.
And if you can grasp your head around those principles, I mean, it puts you in a place where you're able to accomplish things that'll make people scratch their head.
You have to seek that, and you have to be accustomed to the experience of trying to do things and failing, trying to do things and getting maybe a little bit better.
Looking back six months, you're better than you were then.
Looking back a year later, you're better than you were then.
And being able to trust that process and just keep grinding.
People want instantaneous satisfaction.
They want instant advancement.
They want to know that if they take 10 classes, they get a stripe on their white belt.
Like, like, you know, some folks are training every single day.
Like Bourdain, when he was really into jiu-jitsu, he was telling me that he was taking a private every day for an hour and then he was taking a class every day after the private, every day.
There's a picture of him walking down the street somewhere with no shirt on with the ex with his ex, with the, you know, I guess the girl he was dating when he died.
And I also think that there are people who use it as a coping mechanism.
They'll dive into that as opposed to having the hard conversations with themselves or putting the work in because all they're doing actually goes back to what we were talking about before.
They're working so hard on one thing to the exclusion of others.
That's true.
So it's, I mean, I don't have nearly enough experience to comment on jiu-jitsu as a whole or anybody else's journey in it.
From the conversations I've had with coaches that I respect, they have all kind of either experienced that a little bit, that level of dedication, or seen other people who every other aspect of their life is falling apart, but they'll spend three to four hours a day on the mats.
And so one time her and I went to the movies and in the movie, someone was shooting heroin and the person sticks the needle into their arm and plunges the hair and she just blacks out in the movie theater.
And I'm like, what the fuck is going on?
So it's like some really strange, it seems like it's a genetic thing.
Like her and her dad would just fall asleep rando.
But I thought they played dead, but apparently they go into shock and they just lay there and they think that it might increase their benefit, like increase their chances rather of survival because some animals, when they attack them, will stop attacking them if they don't move.
So when the animal attacks them, like a wolf or something will shake them.
And if they just lay perfectly still, they'll think they're dead already.
And they might have a chance of survival that's better than fighting back.
Reflex faints are activated by the nervous system, which slows down the heart rate and lowers blood pressure response to strain, leading to reduced blood flow to the brain.
I bet people who faint like that can get choked out easy.
Triggers for this can be surprisingly benign.
For some people, laughing, coughing, swallowing, urinating, uriny.
I don't know enough about trumpet to answer that question.
I know that.
He was awesome.
He was awesome, but that's not the way they teach you to do it.
Like, they teach you to keep your mouth shut.
Because I remember I took a class, music class on trumpet playing.
And when I was in the class, I was like remembering how Dizzy Gillespie did it.
And I was like, that's crazy.
Like, this guy's a legend.
And he did it the total opposite.
because you're not supposed to fill your face up with air you're supposed to like like what's the correct find out what's the correct technique for blowing a trumpet Because I think you're supposed to keep your mouth closed and keep everything tight.
You're definitely not supposed to fill your face up with air.
Last time I rung my bell, it was actually at jiu-jitsu.
It was, again, completely my fault.
And I'm glad at this point, I can, I'm recognizing my mistakes and avoiding them, but I was, guy was turtled up and I was on his back too far towards his shoulders.
Anytime there's a movement where weight from two guys is on the head, one of the guys from, I think it was Team Alpha Male.
I've heard this happen more than once, where someone shoots for a takedown and the other guy gets a guillotine and falls back.
And so as the guy drives forward with the takedown, his head hits first with both of their weight and they paralyze.
He broke his neck and he's paralyzed from the neck down.
I've heard that happen on more than one occasion from that exact specific move.
A guy shoots in for a double.
The other guy like just goes with it with the guillotine and gets the head to the side and all the weight of the head, all the weight of the two bodies hits the top of the head and it snaps the neck.
That sucks for both people because you know the person who had the guillotine obviously had no intent to try to do that and you have to live with that weight.
Well, you know, anytime you hurt somebody in training, like anytime like something happens and someone gets hurt, you're always thinking about that next time you're training.
Like whenever you're in a weird position, like a tangle of legs and someone's knee explodes, like every time you're in that situation afterwards, you're like, oh, shit.
I heard a guy, I believe it was his MCL go And everybody freezes, and then he starts moving his leg a little bit and then brace for the next six to eight weeks.
The left one, they did it with a patella tendon graft, the right one they did with a cadaver.
The right one was way quicker.
It healed quick with no like real residual pain.
The right one was like six months later, I was doing jiu-jitsu, but the left one with the patella tendon graft, that was like a whole year before it felt good.
And plus, if you're waking up in the middle of the night, still trying to figure out how somebody did that to you, that's you're like, you play, you're like, oh, that motherfucker.
I find myself, like, to this day, I'll be on the fucking air assault bike and I'll be doing those Tabata reps and I'll think about someone who tapped me because I was tired like 10 years ago.
I'll think about this moment where I know I could have pulled out of a triangle, but I was just too fucking exhausted and then I wound up getting tapped.
You can do it with anything to include body weight.
So I used to work for CrossFit, and one of the first things that they would do is they would get everybody out air squats, Tabata air squats, and your score was based off the maximum number that you could hold through the eight rounds.
So if you did 30 air squats in the first round, but four in the eighth, your score is four.
And so, and most people, I think around 20 would be pretty good.
If that was your first exposure to that, though, you are going to be, you're going to be either looking for a wheelchair the next few days or walking like you have no fine motor control over your legs.
You can do it with the kettlebells, Tabatas with the dumbbell.
You can do it sprinting.
It's one of the most effective protocols that I've ever touched.
It's pretty commonly accepted, I think, now, like long, slow distance runners, they can maintain what they have, if not add to it by doing shorter interval work.
I mean, I know, well, I don't know, an incredibly high-level ones, but I know people who can perform at that level and they're not going past like a 400-meter, maybe at most some repeats of 800, like one on, one off.
The first workout, so for, I would say, the first nine years when I was in the military, it was back and buys, chest and tries, and then legs.
And by that, I mean a shirtless rom on the beach.
Repeated for like nine years.
The first time I did a CrossFit style workout, it was actually I was introduced to it through Mark Twite, who's an amazing alpinist, has done some just spectacular stuff, and he's a wealth of knowledge.
And I forget the exact structure, but it was squats, a kettlebell swing, and pull-ups.
And it was, it started at a high number, and the workout is called Jones Worthy.
And at the end of it, I felt, I was like, okay, like my body feels a little bit different.
The next morning, I fell down my stairs because my legs refused to work.
That's how much it destroyed me.
And I think the workout took like six to eight minutes.
And I had been around weights my entire adult life.
And I'm talking to the point where like you need a rappel harness to get onto the toilet because like as you're squatting down, your legs give out and you're going to blast the bowl up.
It's just like holding on to the door for dear life so you can actually not break the porcelain.
I would expose people very gradually, and I would do a mix of that type of conditioning and pure strength because I can't think of a single downside to being strong.
Like when you're doing it, it's a grueling type of workout.
But I think those and like gorilla cleans where you have like, you know, one in each side, clean press, squats, and doing reverse, you know, lunges and then reverse backward lunges and like things where you're forcing yourself to balance out that weight while you're moving.
I think those are probably some of the best exercises for jiu-jitsu.
And then another thing that's really good for jiu-jitsu is yoga.
Yoga's phenomenal for jiu-jitsu.
It really is because it forces you to be able to hold positions and breathe and control your body and control your breath in those positions.
And also you maintain flexibility and strength and especially like around the joints surrounding and like with your knee joints when you're standing on one leg balancing.
I think it helps keep your body limber too, which I think is very important at jiu-jitsu because there's always positions where having a little bit more flexibility is very beneficial.
Like some of the best jiu-jitsu guys are very flexible.
Like Hicks and Gracie famously was like very into yoga when he was young and was the thing there's many things that separated him from other people.
Now, whether or not he made it to America, whether or not that's true, I think he's in an undisclosed location because they're worried about threats of violence from these truck drivers.
That eventually they're going to implement some sort of a social credit score system that goes along with vaccine passports and that these things are what they're angling towards and that by slowly incrementally moving in this direction, they're going to apply these new methods to control the population.
You know, what's going on in China?
Have you ever paid attention to their social credit score system?
If your social credit does not align with what's acceptable in order for you to purchase it, it doesn't matter if you have the money to do so.
See, this is where it could get wild.
And this is not happening, nor is it suggested to happen in the United States.
I'm just saying, like, this is what happens in China.
If you step out of line, if you protest some of the things the government's doing, if you speak openly and critically about certain aspects of society, they can put a hit on your social credit.
Because essentially, the idea is that they'll be able to influence what you say and what you do because you won't want to get a hit on your social credit because that'll keep you from being able to go on vacation.
It'll keep you from being able to buy a car.
It'll keep you from being able to buy things.
And one of the things that Yahoo had recently, there was an article on Yahoo where they were talking about people allowing certain organizations, certain government organizations, access to your browser history.
And the incentive would be maybe you could qualify for more credit if they had access to your browser history.
So I remember they talk about in here, which I guess we can play to if you want to.
There is a way that if someone goes to CVS, their version of a pharmacy and buys, you know, something that says they have a cough or they have a temperature, it goes through the system into their phone.
A message pops up, which I think they sort of show here in a second.
That says you can't continue to go places until you now have passed a COVID test that says you're not.
I don't know exactly what's going on in these videos, but this was part of this piece that popped up along with all the stuff they were talking about that day.
But now they're unwilling to change course because the fear of the pandemic may be one thing, but the fear of not being accepted by that party that they identify with.
So they'll do anything.
And I have nothing against masks, but hey, wear a mask at all times.
Wear it in school.
Wear it regardless of your age.
And they're just like, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.
They'll do that.
It's kind of shocking to me how reactive people are.
I mean, I'm a fan of people being able to do whatever the hell they want to do, but I also really appreciate people making informed decisions as opposed to just doing what they're told and not looking into it at all.
The real concern is that decisions that you make right now that you think are good short term, you have to look at the consequences long term.
I remember there was a discussion during the Obama administration about the indefinite detention it was about Guantanamo it wasn't No, it wasn't just Guantanamo.
It was, I forget what the act was that they were trying to pass, but this idea that they didn't necessarily need the same protections of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights were not going to apply if they could somehow or another decide that you were a target that was worthy.
I forget what the parameters were.
But what I forget what it was called, but what I do remember was that one of the things they were saying was that this is not something that we would ever use.
I'm like, well, then why do you have it?
Because if it's not something you would use, is this what it is?
Yeah, here it is.
Defense authorization.
Okay.
Minus indefinite detention ban.
That's right.
The NDAA.
That's exactly what it was.
So the NDAA still allows indefinite detention of American citizens by the military, but President Obama says his administration won't use this power.
That's exactly it.
So like that, just that alone.
Indefinite.
Yeah.
Indefinite means the rest of your life.
Like that's, there's no, indefinite doesn't mean a week.
It seems like an indefinite war, indefinite, whatever you want to call it, conflict.
I mean, it's always going to be a strategy that certain states use to try to implement their goals.
You're going to have terror.
You're going to have terrorist attacks.
And when we're looking at this gigantic world of resources and of conflicts, and the idea of a time in the future where there's no war, no conflict, that's one of the most depressing things about being a person.
Like, there's no, if you had a bet, what is the gamble?
What are the odds that there's going to come a day where there's no war?
I mean, the most accurate thing you could look at would be the rearview mirror on that.
And I am not an expert in humanity or the history of humans, but I don't think there has been a stretch of time in the history of humans where there has not been conflict or fighting, which at least escalated the war.
Probably smaller scale as we were evolving and society was growing, but I can't think of a single period of time.
We'd come back 100 million years and see what's left and what starts over again.
Yeah.
The real scary thing is like if all the nukes flew, it wouldn't just be all the people die.
It would be so much life dies that whatever is left, the amount of time that it would take to evolve back into a position where we could have advanced intelligent life again.
And I say we, with the, that's the loosest use of the word, we.
not really gonna be us and what what kind of life I mean the if you go back and look at the history of earth and life on earth you know the earth is what four point something billion years old right Probably depends on who you ask.
And intelligent life is basically limited to the last couple of hundred thousand years.
And out of that intelligent life, there's only one species that has the capability of space travel, you know, electronics, manipulating its environment.
It's all just one.
I mean, it could easily be that that one species didn't exist.
Like, there was that one, was it Indonesia?
We've talked about this recently, where there was a super volcano eruption like 70,000 years ago that brought the entire human race down to a few thousand people.
Wow, the volume compared to almost 3 million empire state buildings.
Holy fuck.
Look at this.
The explosion of the Toba super volcano, located on the modern island of Sumatra some 74,000 years ago was Earth's largest volcanic eruption in the past 28 million years.
Parts of Indonesia, India, and the Indian Ocean were covered by 15 centimeters, six inches of volcanic debris, an estimated 1,700 cubic miles of rock, a volume comparable to almost 3 million Empire State buildings erupted, forming a crater lake visible even from space.
So that brought the entire human race down to a few thousand people.
Like, I think they just tried to figure out where people emanated from.
And that's a good question.
It is a question.
Oh, a few thousand survivors.
Okay, here it is.
Genetic evidence, there it is, indicates a collapse in human population around 74,000 years ago with all modern humans descending from a few thousand survivors.
According to the Toba catastrophe theory, most humans in Europe and Asia didn't make it as the climate and environment suddenly changed in the aftermath of the Toba eruption, and only a small group with a limited genetic variability survived by chance in Africa.
But archaeological and paleoclimate records don't seem to fit this theory.
And I think that when you're hearing it from people that are losing the information attention game, like people like CNN, when they're calling for other networks or other shows or other programs to be censored or other programs to be limited, it's like, just do better.
Like you guys should be better at what you're doing.
More people should be paying attention to than are.
Like, why aren't they?
Well, first of all, it's the format.
Like, this format of seven minutes or whatever it is, and then commercial.
I'm assuming you've done live TV interviews, like remotely, too, where you're staring at the blank lens and you have approximately 30 seconds to unpack a very complicated subject.
Whenever I do a podcast with three people, it's hard.
If it was you and one other guy there, it's difficult to get a flow.
Because I know when you're about to say something and I back off and I'm listening to you and then I talk and we're trying to like dance.
When there's three people, it's harder to dance.
When there's four people that you don't even know and you know you have this limited amount of time, it's like, and people have these like planned out rants that they want to go on and it's like, and everyone's trying to go viral.
For like Peter McCullough, you'd be able to find them online.
There's some very intelligent, very bold doctors.
There's a guy named Vinay Prasad that I actually tweeted one of his articles that was critical of, I think it was Malone.
It was Malone or McCullough.
I forget which guy.
It might have been both.
But he would work really well.
There's quite a few of these guys that are like really highly educated doctors that have differing perspectives, but they're more fact-based than narrative-based.
Because there's some certain people that are just, they follow whatever the projected narrative is.
Like whatever the government's projecting, whatever the CDC is projecting, the World Health Organization, they're saying exactly what those people are saying.
Even when those things turn out to be incorrect, right?
Well, it's part of the problem, too, because if you consistently tell people that what they're seeing is not what they're seeing and what they're hearing is not what they're hearing.
So if you knew somebody, a friend of yours, who consistently just told you that, no, your eyes are wrong and your ears are wrong, how long would it be before you completely tune that person out?
And that's, I think, a lot of what's happening with both sides.
I mean, I try to stay out of left and right arguments because I don't know if I've ever felt less represented by the representatives of our government right now.
I'm fucking lost in this middle ground.
It's like, can I have a little bit on this side and also a little bit on this side?
And there's also this lost art I wish people would accept.
And that is the ability to not have a fucking opinion about something.
You don't have to explode and be passionate about everything.
I have that tactical asshole page, and he's just the cashmere cunt because he's always out there in a cashmere shirt shooting a fucking pistol carbine, which, again, is like an MP5.
You know, so like he trained Keanu Reeves famously and Hallie Berry and a lot of other people for films and Kevin Hart's been there and a bunch of other, you know, Michael P. Jordan's been there.
Michael B. Jordan.
B, right?
Sorry.
You know, the guy from well, Creed.
He's been in everything.
But those people that want to learn how to look like Billy Badass, they go to Terran Tactical.
I mean, the only thing you can really tell on the videos is how, you know, stance, grip, how you're managing your reach coil and how you're controlling your trigger.
I'm not necessarily saying you're doing anything wrong.
That's why I was asking you what you're doing out there.
So we would do speedruns all the time.
Don't get me wrong.
The number one tool to get somebody to unwind on a pistol range is that fucking shot timer.
I have watched guys who are so incredibly competent shooting and you get them into a competition setting and they're just like, eh, and they're just like putting magazines and their pistols backwards, which is amazing.
I totally support it.
Dropping shit.
I mean, it's dead man guns where you're presenting.
you should be able to find a red dot site that allows you to co-witness.
And what that means is...
Yeah.
And so that way...
Even if it fucks up.
And for people who carry every day, like I have a red dot on the gun that I carry.
When I practice or if I were ever to draw down, I am expecting to be looking at the iron sights because if I can line that up appropriately, the red dot's going to be right there.
That would be, especially when it comes to long-distance marksmanship, like you're behind a sniper rifle and you want to make a really long shot.
There's no room for anticipation.
That should apply to both a carbine and a pistol.
But here's the reality, right?
If it's between me and you, I'm not going to line.
Like if we're this distance, I'm not even going to bother aiming.
I'm going to point my thumbs at you and pull the triggers many times until the target or the threat is no longer a threat.
So in theory, yes, but the situation is going to dictate how much you're actually going to need to do that in practice.
But in learning it, that should always be the way that you practice it because then you can increase your speed with that.
And then it'll allow you to, you know, as you try to go faster and faster or the targets are closer and closer, you can deviate from that just a little bit.
I mean, you don't need a surprise break for something that's three to five yards away.
I think there was always enough stuff around to wipe your ass with, but when somebody goes to Costco and buys a semi-truck full, it limits the amount that everybody else can get.
So if everybody had bought perhaps a reasonable amount, which is what happened where I live, is they started limiting how many boxes you could buy because people would just come in right and they're just sweeping into a cart.
Right.
Well, there was an increase.
You can tell that just by looking at the number of firearms applications, you know, you have to do the background check and all that.
Those numbers increase.
So if there's new gun owners, they're going to be buying more ammunition.
But I think the scarcity was largely artificial just due to people wildly buying probably too much.
Well, I remember during the lockdowns when there was giant lines outside the gun stores in LA.
I was like, wow.
Like driving by and seeing a long line outside of a gun store was so bizarre and was spooky to people because all these people that are used to driving by that gun store and seeing nothing and then all of a sudden you see it now sort of signals to you, shit, maybe I should get in there and get a gun.
Also, people buy guns, you know, exercise your Second Amendment ride if you want to.
It's better to have the gun before you need it than be standing out in line for a 10-day wait period.
Oh, yeah.
But again, people make a choice on that.
But the ammo shortage will make people not want to train.
And you can actually do the vast majority of the training without actually firing a round.
For people who can still carry, indexing, clearing fabric out of the way, practicing your draw, everything, the execution magazine changes.
You can have an awesome day of training.
And obviously it depends on the experience level that you have.
I could do like an hour's training and actually get a lot out of it with somewhere probably between 20 to 30 rounds because I can do a lot of it dry fire.
Or what I'll do is I'll do one round in each magazine if I'm working manipulation or reloads.
So I'm not shooting an entire magazine full.
I'm focusing on the actual motor skills themselves.
So did you see that fucking video of the guy in a car in a road rage situation shooting right through his fucking side window and then through his windshield?
The incident in question happened in June in Miami, blah, blah, blah.
When I saw a very loud noise, and I've heard gunshots to me, it sounded like a gunshot.
I didn't want to see if I was going to be killed.
According to the arrest report, he changed lanes and cut off another driver.
That driver identified as blah, blah, blah, began to tailgate him, according to police.
He then slammed on his brakes.
Police said then the guy threw a water bottle at the passenger window of his car, but he didn't know what it was at the time, and he thought he was being fired upon.
I did what I instinctively felt was necessary.
Authorities said 11 shots were fired, but no injuries were reported.
When they call it stand your ground, whether you call it self-defense, he said Mr. Popper is not only not guilty, he is innocent and justified, said his attorney.
Again, so I'm going to get that looked like a sub-compact nine millimeter pistol.
That'll go through glass for sure.
But it doesn't, like, if you shoot through, you're better off shooting at a distance into glass as opposed to shooting through glass at a close distance and having it ricochet out.
Like every one of those rounds is going to find a home somewhere.
And that is exactly, and again, the legal system can work out whether or not the guy is innocent or guilty.
I don't have an issue with that.
But discharging a firearm like that on the road, you're out of your fucking mind.
And that is exactly the type of video that people will point to to try to strip those things away.
And having a round in the chamber, opinions may vary on this.
I would say if you're going to carry a gun and you don't feel comfortable having a round in the chamber, you may want to consider not carrying.
An unloaded gun has the same effective distance as a claw hammer.
And gross motor skills very often are going to be the first things that degrade in a violent confrontation.
So depending on how you have it carried, let's say you're an appendix carry, you're going to have to get that thing out, load around into the chamber, and then index your target.
There's a lot of steps involved in that.
Guns don't just actively, they don't just go off on their own.
So to me, when people are not comfortable with carrying with a round in the chamber, oftentimes it's oftentimes based in kind of a lack of understanding of how a firearm actually functions.
You know, they're a tool designed to take life, though.
And people get really, really twitchy when you define them like that because they feel like if you are, if you say that, then that somehow creates an argument for restricting them.
And I think it's a disingenuous thing to say.
They are a tool that is designed to take life.
It can be used to preserve and save life for sure, but they should be treated like that tool.
And that, to me, is like as irresponsible as it gets.
Yeah, but it's there's another video that I saw once where a similar situation happens on the highway and it's a similar angle.
And this guy is on a highway and there's someone in the passenger seat next to him and he just starts shooting through his windshield at this car on the highway.
And you see the guy in the passenger seat like freaking the fuck out because this dude is just unloading through his windshield.
Well, I'm sure it was happening to a small degree before then, but it kind of exploded afterwards, I would say.
Maybe with the creation of multi-cam, the pattern that many people will wear on everything from flip-flops to hats to backpacks to speedos, shorts, shirts, fill in the blank.
I love animals, but I had a cat that I raised and he was feral.
Like my friend Laney and her boyfriend had found these cats under an apartment building and she was trying to give the kittens a home and this fucking cat was wild as shit.
It was a little baby.
And when I would pick it up, it would purr.
But as soon as I put it down, it'd be like, I think it was crazy.
Anyway, cut to cats piss in your house.
Like, and male cats, you have to fix.
If you don't fix them, they spray on your walls.
And this motherfucker started spraying on my walls.
So they're breathing water and their gills are processing it and turning into air.
But it's just this idea that we're living in this world where three quarters of it is completely covered in water and we don't go in there.
But what we do do is we take these little boats and we bring them out onto that water and they float around out there and then they suck all the fish out in giant nets.
Especially where those crabs are, even just in places where tides, rip currents, swells.
We did cold weather training up in Kodiak, Alaska.
That was actually one of the first trips that I had done when I checked into my first team.
And they do it OTB or OTH.
So over the beach where you come in in Zodiacs and swim in and climb up or OTH, you drive out over the horizon to practice navigation and fucking dry suit in the Arctic Ocean, which I'm not actually sure it's in the Arctic Ocean, but it feels like it.
And then you come back in and then you swim across and then you climb up.
It's yeah, because like there are places where salt water does freeze up, obviously, which is why you have the polar ice caps and why you have all those ice sheets.
I know it's cold enough to give you an ice cream headache and you immediately know whether or not the zippers are done correctly on your dry suit.
Oh yeah.
That's where Barklow taught.
He was up there, I think, for like 10 years.
He was running the Kodiak cold weather facility, which is phenomenal training, but it definitely gives you an appreciation for how little the environment gives a fuck about you or your survival.
I think you're usable without a dry suit or survival suit.
I think your usable time of consciousness is under 20 minutes if you go into that water.
But one thing I will tell you is that when it would have been more fun if we actually got a deer.
But what was really amazing was when we came back and we came back to California, the sun, just the everyday normal sun of LA hitting my face felt fucking amazing.
It felt so good.
I remember calling Renell up.
I go, dude, I have never been happier.
I am the fucking happiest I've ever been.
And it's crazy.
It's like, I don't think this happiness is available unless you're miserable.
I think you have to get miserable for a week.
And then when it's over, then you really appreciate that sun.
Because I was just used to the sun.
I completely took it for granted.
It was out there every day.
I'd be in that sun every day, and it would be like it was nothing.
But because of that, I was like, oh, my God, this sun is incredible.
The way it felt on my face, like I was so filled with joy and happy.
They don't look at their life and go, what do I really want?
They look in terms of like, oh, I want that car.
Oh, I want to live in that house.
They have these ideas in their head that if they had these objects and these things and at least they could show on paper that they're successful, it'll make them feel good.
And I think kids are really fucked up today looking at Instagram.
Instagram and TikTok and social media where they're seeing these people live these baller lifestyles and they look at that and they that's the goal.
Out of all the ways that they could have tried to figure that out, like looking over your shoulder, being sneaky, just hand you the device and pretend like nothing's going on and retrieve them.
I think our real problem is if people start saying the only way we can compete with China is if we have the same sort of restrictions on our citizens that China has, if we have the same ability to monitor our citizens, if we have the same ability to implement laws the way China does.
That could be a real problem because one of the things that China's done, it's so brilliant.
I'm not saying that we should do it, but it is brilliant.
How they've got this connection between their business and their government that's inescapable.
You cannot make these big corporate decisions, whether you're Huawei or one of these big tech companies, they work, you know, fucking hand in glove with the government.
And because of that, they make these decisions not based on short-term interest of the corporation in terms of like stakeholders and what the shareholders want and profits for the quarter.
They're looking at it in this long-term commitment, like what's going to be best for the party.
It's terrible in terms of creativity and innovation and the ability to have a dream and an idea and implement it and then become successful.
One of the things that we love about America is entrepreneurial spirit.
We love the fact that someone can, like Origin, we're talking about Chaco's company or anything else.
Someone can create a company and make something and put it together.
And that's one of the things that's beautiful about freedom is you have the ability to take a chance to do something that you have a dream.
You can put it together and make it happen.
We all love that.
And when you take that away, you take away people's ability to take a chance and take away people's ability to do what they want.
Instead, you have to do what the government wants.
As soon as you do that, you close the door on so much innovation.
You close the door on so many opportunities that you would have never predicted, right?
Because who knows how many ideas that have been implemented here because people had this wild spirit of like being creative and taking chances would have never happened if the same person grew up under a regime like the CCP.
I do worry, though, that people are becoming resistant to taking chances and being risky like that or getting off of the couch, if you want to describe it that way.
So they'll value that less and the incremental, if again, you want to put the tinfoil hat on, the incremental removing of those opportunities or ability to make those decisions.
They won't even realize what is lost because they don't value it because they never actually took a fucking chance.
I think talking about it like this and having conversations with people who do take chances makes taking chances exciting to the people that are listening.
I think part of the problem is they don't have enough to model.
There's not enough people out there that are taking chances where someone could model that and go, that's what I want to do.
That's what I want to be.
You know, because that's like, it's like who you're modeling.
Like if you grew up in a family where no one takes any chances and everybody just takes the safest, easiest job they can have with the least amount of risk and the most amount of security and they live this dull gray life like blah forever.
You model that if that's what you're around and or you rebel and you rebel and you take a wild chance.
And in a lot of families, if you try to take a chance, your parents will be pissed at you.
I mean, you know, there's so many people out there that are hindered and then they're saddled down by the problem of their own family having expectations on them.
You're supposed to be a lawyer.
You're supposed to be this.
You're supposed to, you know, there's a lot of people like that out there that just, the model that they copy is a model of like safety and where no one's doing anything risky.
It may not be there, but I think the same reasons, I think, again, my personal opinion, I don't speak for the military.
I don't speak for anybody else.
I'm largely renowned as an idiot, so you don't have to listen to anything that I have to say.
But I think the reasoning for going into Afghanistan, looking in the rearview mirror, was far more legitimate than the reasoning to go into Iraq.
I don't know if we solved any problems in either of those countries, especially with how we left Afghanistan and kind of more, that's more how we're going to be viewed by the rest of the world and potential future partner forces and stuff like that.
But I don't think we saw, I don't think we solved anything.
One, people want to blame it all on Biden, which is fair to a degree, but also unfair to a larger degree.
He was sitting in the seat at the time the decisions were made, so he has to own those and the consequences that come from them.
But the decision to withdraw or draw down from Afghanistan started probably in the Obama administration into the Trump administration, and he inherited that.
So it's not as if his administration was solely responsible for the planning of that.
Again, he was in the seat, and when you're in the seat and shit starts going south, change the fucking plan to match the reality on the ground as opposed to what you think the pie in the sky is going to be.
Because your enemy gets a vote in any plan, or even in the business world, right?
Your competition gets a vote.
You got to be able to lateral to work your way through that.
There's a lot of different ways that I think it could have gone down better.
They could have done it out of Bagram, which put about some more dead space.
They could have done it in a more phased drawdown.
They could have listened to the military leadership that was saying, hey, maybe we keep a very small footprint.
A lot of different ways.
What I will say is this.
In my experience with the people that I served with, not a single person that I served with or that I know that served over there is surprised by what happened.
And by that, I mean the Taliban taking over.
Many are surprised to include myself at the pace with which it happened.
But if you served in that country and you served alongside of that partner force, if you tell me that you were surprised by what happened, I would say that you might have a loose relationship with the truth because the writing was on the wall for a very long period of time.
That, I don't know if that was a mechanism of this is the date that we have to be out of here.
And everybody ignored that date until it was too late.
You know, the United States, the military is great at being, at least in the modern era, it's great at being surgical.
Like we went to Afghanistan to try to root out the people that planned and executed 9-11.
And we did so within, I'll call it, at a very long stretch, 24 months.
We were there for 20 years.
I would say the longer that we were there, the more equipment and material that goes with that.
We started building out stations and every out, you know what I mean?
So the more pieces that you put on the board, it doesn't surprise me that that volume of stuff was left.
And to me, that's more, it just shows, you know, either they weren't really paying attention that we needed to draw down or there was so much stuff there that they didn't know what to do with it.
But the Taliban is the best armed and equipped that they've ever been in the history of the Taliban, for sure.
Let's just say politely that there are other countries, entities, and organizations that don't really favor the United States and would do everything they could to be on the axis of whatever we're doing that will send mobile training teams over there that could fly in those things, you know, the day that we left them.
He introduces me to Callan and Shop and I did The Fighter and the Kid.
And then I met you.
So the third podcast I had ever been on, mind you, I had not listened to a podcast.
The first time that you and I sat down, I may have changed some of my answers.
I had no understanding of the size of your audience or what was going to come out of my mouth.
I needed to probably refine the thought expression of certain things.
But it was your suggestion to start a podcast.
And my theory, even in the military or just growing up, is maybe listen to the person in the room who has the most experience or who is the most successful.
Doesn't mean they're going to be 100% right.
But if somebody is saying, hey, I've done this for a long time and maybe you should check it out.
It'd be worth considering.
So I had absolutely no idea what it was going to be, what I was going to talk about, how I was going to do it.
But I took your advice and I started.
Never thought for a second that it was going to be a profession or an occupation of any kind.
And I love it.
I love sitting down and exploring.
First off, I truly believe that the thing, like I'm not excited by the stuff that I do, but I'm fascinated by the stuff that other people do.
You know, a buddy of mine is like telling stories about drug-addicted parents, and he's like running through the fucking desert barefoot to try to get to his grandparents' house just to feel happy or safe.
I'm like, oh, my God.
Like calling my parents, like, thank you very much for who you are.
Like, I'm sorry for anything that I ever did.
I am an unworthy piece of shit of the love that you have provided.
But it's been, it's been amazing.
And the financial aspect of it came way later on, but it is by far the favorite thing that I do because I get to sit down and talk to people about what they are passionate about.
And it informs my opinion on things and it changes my mind on stuff.
And I just think it's awesome to be able to sit there and have an exchange and have a dialogue.
It's like it gives you an education on things in a way that you're hard pressed to find anywhere else.
I mean, I think back on my podcast, and obviously a lot of them are filled with nonsense and just smoking pot and getting drunk and talking shit, but there's been more than a thousand of them that aren't like that.
So it's like a thousand times I sat down with an expert for hours and got to pick their brain and ask them questions about whatever their field was and expand my knowledge, just understanding of different things in life substantially.
Like I am such a different person than I was 10 years ago, say.
It constantly reminds me of how little I know is maybe an easy way to put it because there's maybe skydiving in some aspects of the military, maybe a little bit on the shooting side of the house I could talk at from a from a level of experience that exceeds maybe most people on every other topic on the face of the planet.
It is not what, like you're saying, I would push back and I would say that there aren't limited options for people getting out of the military.
It's easy for people getting out of the military to say that there are limited options.
But I don't care what you do in the military.
You are going to leave with skill sets and an understanding of things like discipline, teamwork, integrity, communication, to name just a few of the many usable tools that you can put into your virtual tool belt.
You know, it's you have to take some ownership of the course that your life is going to take.
Yes, it can be jarring to lose a sense of camaraderie or community.
And yes, you can feel isolated because you're no longer with your tribe and the job is totally different.
And in the same breath, like fucking get over it.
You need to move on.
You need to do something else.
And for me, one of the things that drives me the most is I do not want to be defined by what I did a lifetime ago.
I hate it.
And I'll always have the fuck trident hanging over my head.
And I couldn't be more proud that I was in that community.
But at the end of the day, I'd rather that just be a footnote instead of the title across the top.
And I think people would be better off if they took that philosophy and approach, in my opinion, which again is limited to only that, but it's not an easy path.
It might take them some time.
They might feel lost a little bit, but that's okay.
I couldn't be more proud of the time that I spent in the military.
I'm very proud of the fact that I am a veteran and I was able to serve.
I have criticism of segments of the veteran culture who can't move past their service.
They will often point at a lot of obstacles that are in their way and ignore the fact that they placed them there.
And their life would be better.
And the perception of the veteran community at large would be better if they were able to move past that.
Like one of the biggest things that irritates me is this broken toys narrative.
I absolutely hate it.
War doesn't have to break you at all.
Does it break some people?
Fuck yes, it does.
I think I'm a better person because of it.
I think I have more of a passion for life.
I think I can love deeper because of my experiences.
I think I have more of a respect for life, having been put into places where I had to make decisions to take it.
And I feel I'm more prepared to solve problems.
I have more of an emotional depth than I did before going in.
And that's because of that experiences.
And like I said, it does break some people.
But if you look at trauma or post-traumatic stress, which I don't believe is a disorder, and I think we should focus far more on post-traumatic growth as opposed to post-traumatic stress because you can navigate that, come out of it stronger.
The math supports that specifically in the civilian world, even more so than in the military world.
But there's a fucked up financial incentive in the military veteran world to actually not get better because they could potentially reduce your rating from the VA, which reduces the amount of money that you get.
So the whole point in saying all that is it's very possible to be a better version of yourself from those experiences, but nobody's going to do it for you.
It's not that it's easy, but it's totally possible.
Veterans aren't broken.
I think they should be held to a higher standard than other people because they come out of that environment where they have those tools.
They have those experiences.
And I don't care what you do in the military.
You know, the emphasis that they place on the same thing, teamwork, integrity, communication, all that stuff, discipline, it's more than what I have seen being taught anywhere at any traditional school.